Winsted: Fear And Amazement

Lorraine Patnoe TalbotWinsted

Mid-August to a 16 year old high school girl meant there was only a couple more weeks of vacation to enjoy before I'd go back to The Gilbert School for my junior year. That it rained every day for a week was annoying but I was a bookish kid and could while away hours reading on our screened-in porch.

We lived in a duplex on North Main Street in Winsted. The house was built on a hill so the first floor was level with the street in the front but in the back the cellar was level with a large sloping yard that ended at the bank of the Still River.

The water level must have been coming up the back yard for a day or two, but I don't remember noticing it until it reached its peak at the two steps into our cellar. My most vivid memory is of kneeling at an upstairs window watching that torrent of dirty water in fear and amazement. My stomach churned and I'd cry as whole trees, small buildings, even cars washed past our house. I prayed no one was in those buildings or vehicles.

Once the rain stopped the current slowed and carried smaller debris, boards and branches instead of buildings and whole trees.

The electric power was out, but unlike our neighbors, we had a gas stove so my mother would cook hot foods for us and the neighbors.

I escaped the first of the aftermath because Betty, my brother Bob's wife, had given birth to their fifth child, Richard Felix, on August 13th and was able to return to their Norfolk home. I was taken there via back roads through Colebrook to stay with them and help my sister-in-law with the new baby and the other kids.

A year later, we moved to a house on a hill, Cyclone Hill, the old-timers called it, after another kind of storm that happened beyond living memory. And soon, our North Main Street duplex, as well as the neighbor's homes were torn down for a flood control project. Route 8 now runs directly over where we were at that time.